President Obama is making a series of speeches on the economy — focusing on an economic vision for supporting and expanding the middle class. There will be other campaign-like speeches advertised to try to change the conversation. What I’m hoping is that these speeches serve as a launching point to start the 2014 effort to remind people that it isn’t “Washington” that is the problem — it is the GOP in Washington who have fought against middle class interests (while they aren’t completely ignoring them) every step of the way. The President rallied with the OFA folks on Monday (and who heard about this? rally that includes Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and the President and where is the news coverage?), and this is what gives me (small) hope:
“I’m going to talk about where we need to go from here. How we need to put behind us the distractions and the phony debates and nonsense that somehow passes for politics these days and get back to basics,” Obama said of his Illinois speech. “Refocus on what it is that everybody is talking about around the kitchen table, what people are talking about day to day with their families.”
We’ll see, I guess. It’s a target-rich environment and it would be nice to see the President start working at knocking them down. In any event, the speech is scheduled to start at 12:55 EDT. Feel free to use this as a liveblog thread if you are watching the speech.